Following further enquiries, Cumming at MI5 found out some of the details regarding Pyke’s undercover poll. He also discovered that, according to Sir Campbell Stuart, Pyke had been trying since then to launch an alternative version of this poll using American conversationalists, and that this would require him to travel to the US. This could explain his line about going to America, but Cumming also learnt that he had been denied permission to visit the US after the idea had been torpedoed by SIS who were worried that Pyke’s undercover work would interfere with their own. Nor did Pyke work for them. In which case, why was he still talking about going to America?
By the end of May 1940, Cumming understood the following about Geoffrey Pyke: he was a ‘known Communist’ connected to a convicted Soviet agent, Percy Glading. His rooms had on several occasions been the source of what sounded like Morse code transmissions, and he was somehow connected to a woman in Golders Green who claimed to be part of a secret service (which was not British). Now he appeared to be in some form of trust or conspiracy with a different woman, Marjory Watson, possibly a Nazi agent and apparently a fascist, who had worked with him on an undercover poll of German public opinion and had since tried to get a job at MI5 with his help. Now they and others were ‘in power’ and planning to go to America. It was all as clear as mud.
Even if he had the inclination, Cumming no longer had the time to unravel Pyke’s activities. MI5 was tottering around him. The Security Service was by then dealing with an average of 8,000 requests each week, an unprecedented figure, most of them from government departments seeking security clearances. It was also suffering from increasingly doddery leadership. For Christopher Andrew, MI5’s official historian, its administration was ‘close to collapse’. Cumming had little choice but to leave Pyke’s case until there was fresh intelligence. He would not have to wait long.
One of the reasons MI5 was struggling to cope by May 1940 was the flood of reports coming in from members of the public convinced that they had seen a German or Italian behaving suspiciously. ‘Collar the lot!’ was, ultimately, the response of the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Soon thereafter the Chiefs of Staff ordered the internment of every male ‘enemy alien’ between the ages of eighteen and seventy and by the end of July 27,000 men had been interned. Most had no pronounced political outlook, while some were openly fascist or indeed anti-fascist. One of the latter was Pyke’s friend ‘Professor Higgins’, the blond-haired German refugee who had appeared – a deus ex machina – to help with the undercover poll.
Pyke was convinced that Higgins could not be a Nazi agent. Instead he saw him as ‘a much persecuted German political refugee of the finest character’. He began to campaign for his release.
One of the first letters he wrote was to an elderly Tory MP, Leo Amery, an erudite, free-thinking Conservative known as the ‘pocket Hercules’ who had recently made the most important speech of his career. During a heated parliamentary debate on the military fiasco which had followed Germany’s invasion of Norway, Amery had quoted the words of Oliver Cromwell with eloquent force, directing them at the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain: ‘Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’ Three days later Chamberlain had resigned and Churchill, Amery’s contemporary at Harrow, someone he had once thrown into the school swimming pool, became Prime Minister. Amery was appointed Secretary of State for India – he had hoped for something more – and just over a month later he received a ‘very agitated letter’ from Geoffrey Pyke.
Amery had met Pyke the year before, and remembered him as ‘a strange creature, Mephistophelian in appearance but with a brilliantly original mind’. He had taken to this wild-haired intellectual and was happy to help. On receiving Pyke’s letter, he wrote to the Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Home Office, Osbert Peake MP, urging him to have Higgins released.
Pyke did not stop here. After contacting Amery he dispatched letters to Sir Robert Vansittart and Sir Richard Acland MP, both of whom also wrote to Osbert Peake, before Pyke wrote to him personally, stressing in oblique terms that Higgins was ‘the only man in a position to perform the task which may be demanded of him. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance that he should not be sent to Canada’, where many ‘enemy aliens’ were being dispatched.
We know that he called Amery’s office repeatedly during the months that followed, as well as Peake’s. The name ‘Higgins’ appears in Pyke’s notebooks more than any other and is invariably underlined or is the first item on a to-do list. Higgins later expressed to Pyke his ‘deep gratitude for your unceasing efforts on my behalf’, and his diaries and correspondence suggest that they were indeed unceasing. Pyke also sent Higgins money, a succession of regular payments, usually of £4 or £5, a respectable sum, which is curious given how short of cash he himself appeared to be.
Higgins was not the only German refugee whose release Pyke campaigned for. He also wrote to the Commandant of Onchan Internment Camp, on the Isle of Man, about a young Jewish German refugee named Heinz Kamnitzer, introducing himself as someone who had not only escaped from an internment camp but had smuggled messages into and out of them, all of which gave him ‘deep sympathy with the Commandants of Internment Camps’. It was an ill-judged ice-breaker and Captain Sidney Kraul was not amused. Nor was he inclined to believe what he had just read, given who it had come from.
By the most unlikely coincidence Kraul had also been interned in Ruhleben in 1915 at the time of Pyke’s escape. Like most detainees, he had convinced himself that escape was impossible without German assistance. Now a man whom Kraul imagined to be a traitor wanted to organise for one of his internees a magazine subscription to what Pyke light-heartedly described as that ‘organ whose dangerous revolutionary tendencies relieve the tedium of the lives of many London bankers’: the Economist.
Kraul said no, before going to the trouble of forwarding this letter to MI5.
‘Pyke is well known to us,’ came the reply, ‘and, for your guidance, we would suggest that extreme caution must be used in any dealings you may have with him.’
Never one to give up easily, Pyke continued to campaign for this refugee’s release and the words ‘Kamnitzer’ and ‘Heinz’ appear in his notebooks almost as frequently as ‘Higgins’. Years later Pyke was made godfather to Kamnitzer’s son. What’s strange about this is that he had only ever met this refugee on two occasions before launching his campaign to have him released.
How can we explain Pyke’s almost obsessive interest in the plight of these two refugees? One of the first mentions of Kamnitzer in Pyke’s notebook may provide a clue.
It was made in late June 1940 and at first looks like any other. There is Kamnitzer’s name, misspelled once, followed by the address of his internment camp. But several details stand out. One is the colour of the ink. It is a distinctive burnt umber which appears nowhere else in Pyke’s papers. The line of the script is also thicker than usual, which suggests that this entry was written using someone else’s pen.
Then there is the spelling of the name Kamnitzer. The first attempt, in Pyke’s distinctive handwriting, is ‘Chamnitzer’. This is crossed out and beneath, in a very different hand, a more scrupulous hand, is the name ‘Kamnitzer’ next to the full address.
That Pyke wrote ‘Chamnitzer’ shows that he was not copying his name from a letter but taking it down in conversation. The different ink suggests that this was not over the phone but face to face and that he had borrowed a pen from his interlocutor. We can also speculate that he was speaking to a man who pronounced the ‘K’ of Kamnitzer in such a way as to make Pyke think of the ‘Ch’ of Chemnitz, the east German town. There is a subtle difference in pronunciation between the two. The ‘Ch’ of Chemnitz is a sound you do not often hear in English, one that would come more naturally to a native German speaker.
So it seems that this name might have been given to him by someone who knew Kamnitzer well enough to pronounce and spell his name correctly and who was probably not English. Less clear i
s why Pyke kept at this task for so long and to what extent it was a favour for a helpless refugee or a job he had been asked to carry out.
In a letter to Higgins, Pyke discussed the prospect of his release and mentioned ‘all those interested in the matter’. In Pyke’s notebooks the text of a telegram reads: ‘Higgins all possible steps would be taken meanwhile facilitate release.’ Neither line supports the idea that Pyke was working alone and was acting out of nothing more than personal friendship.
At last, after a year of campaigning, Pyke’s hard work paid off. He had asked Amery to contact the General Secretary of the Fabian Society, John Parker MP, about Higgins, and had again mentioned it to Sir Stafford Cripps who brought the matter to the attention of the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison. Higgins was duly released. Several months later Kamnitzer was also freed, and again Parker was one of his referees along with Pyke’s friend Sir Richard Acland.
We are left with the same troubling questions: was Pyke’s interest purely personal or was he working on behalf of others, and if so, whom? Perhaps we should do what Pyke would do at a moment like this. We need to reformulate the question. Who would want to see Higgins and Kamnitzer released?
‘Professor Higgins’, the man who had vetted most of Pyke’s pollsters, was in fact a hardened communist ‘cadre’ who operated under the Party cover-name Blonder Hans or ‘Blond John’. His real name was Rolf Rünkel. He was a senior intelligence operative for the German Communist Party (KPD). Based on clues in his past, as well as gaps in his record at the Comintern archive in Moscow, it seems that early on in his career Rünkel was recruited by the NKVD, the Soviet security service. Certainly by the time of his release from internment on the Isle of Man, in 1941, the Gestapo had Rünkel on a list of known communist saboteurs operating in the USSR who should be tracked down during Operation Barbarossa.
Rünkel was a shortish, powerful-looking man who walked with the metronomic gait of somebody accustomed to carrying out orders. ‘The blond beast’, as he was known to his cell-mate on the Isle of Man, embodied for some the most formidable kind of communist. There was a detachment in the way he described his vision of a Soviet Germany, an ideological clarity which knew little of compromise. ‘Certain words were missing from his vocabulary,’ that same cell-mate wrote, ‘words like pity, tolerance, freedom. The only purpose of his existence was to make the world ripe for Communism, and if, to achieve this ideal, a few millions more or less had to die, so much the worse for them.’
The son of a university professor, Rünkel had grown up in a small town outside Essen and in the late 1920s had joined the secret apparatus of the KPD, the AM-Apparat or M-Apparat. He worked for the Party in Breslau and Berlin, and may have gone to Moscow several years later for his training. At the time, the Soviet Union had its sights firmly set on Germany, with Berlin the Comintern’s centre of European operations. Soviet agents working in Germany for the NKVD or its military intelligence counterpart, the GRU, were given logistical support by German communists and, according to one former communist, by 1930 there was a consensus in the Comintern ‘that a Soviet Germany was “in the bag”.’
This was not wishful thinking. The KPD won six million votes in the 1932 elections. Had its leaders ignored instructions from Moscow and brokered an alliance with the other great force on the German left, the SPD, their coalition could have taken the Reichstag. But Moscow’s ‘Class against Class’ line forbade this and instead Hitler came to power.
The KPD was forced underground and Rünkel was moved by the Party to Lower Silesia where he worked in an illegal network for a year before fleeing to Prague following the arrest of others in his KPD Bezirksleitung – Party district leadership. The Europe through which he travelled was a continent in flux. It was becoming once again a deracinated age and this suited Moscow perfectly. Cadres like Rünkel could now enter parts of Europe which might otherwise have been off-limits.
In Prague, Rünkel was appointed head of Intelligence and Analysis in the KPD’s Abwehrapparat – the intelligence section – and became a close assistant of Wilhelm Koenen, the most senior KPD figure in Prague. ‘Professor Higgins’ was also close to the NKVD agent Herbert Lessig, chief of Soviet intelligence in Czechoslovakia, and there is a chance that Rünkel might have spied on Koenen for Moscow at around this time.
Otherwise his work involved vetting refugees, maintaining Party discipline and, during the latter stages of 1938, helping to spirit KPD members out of Czechoslovakia before the start of the Nazi occupation. Here he ensured that where possible the Party’s political rivals, often SPD refugees, would end up in the hands of the local Gestapo, soon to be taken over by Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat later described by Hannah Arendt as the embodiment of the ‘banality of evil’.
Rünkel then became one of the first communists to be smuggled out of Prague, in December 1938 – a sure mark of his seniority within the intelligence Apparat. He went first to France, where he was arrested and forced to sign a document pledging never to return. In March 1939 he arrived in London and moved in with Koenen, now leader of the German communist exiles in Britain. They lived in a Brixton safehouse which had been supplied by someone who was almost certainly a ‘closed’ Party member, Lord Faringdon – still Treasurer of Pyke’s VIAS.
Shortly after his arrival in London this devout communist, by then responsible for the imprisonment, detention and probable execution of many socialist rivals, took on the part of Professor Higgins in Pyke’s survey. He later resumed his work in the Records Department of what would become the Czech Refugee Trust Fund (CRTF), a government-funded body which supplied aid and visas to Czech refugees, where again he did everything he could to ensure that his fellow German communists were brought out of Czechoslovakia at the expense of those affiliated to the SPD.
If Rünkel had scruples about this work then he kept them to himself. He was a professional communist and, as former Party member Charlotte Haldane put it: ‘In the case of all non-Russian professional Communists, the Stalinist system requires a discipline and a loyalty apart from and above all loyalties to the Party member’s fatherland or nation.’ He could be warm and charming but remained utterly committed to the communist cause.
Rolf Rünkel, otherwise known as ‘Professor Higgins’ or ‘Blonder Hans’
It is easy, then, to imagine who would have wanted him to be released. The same goes for the other man on whose behalf Pyke campaigned with such tenacity, Heinz Kamnitzer. He had fled Germany in 1933, aged sixteen, after his father was taken to Buchenwald Concentration Camp, making him one of the first and youngest Jewish refugees to arrive in Britain from Nazi Germany. After two years he moved to Palestine and ‘made aliyah’, something his parents, both committed Zionists, had always hoped for. Yet his time in the Middle East did not end well. After working for a period as a carpenter in Palestine he lost his job, joined the illegal apparat of the Palestinian Communist Party and was forced to flee when he heard that the police were onto him.
By late 1936 Kamnitzer was in London once again, surviving this time on a small stipend from the Palestinian communists. His services as a Party cadre were also sought by the German Communist Party and in 1938 he was forced to choose between the two, ultimately allying himself to the latter.
By this stage Kamnitzer was living in Lawn Road Flats, the modernist block in Hampstead which also housed Arnold Deutsch, the cosmopolitan, charismatic Soviet agent then running Kim Philby. NKVD records show that during his time in London, Deutsch recruited some twenty Soviet agents and had contact with almost thirty. We do not know the identities of all those agents, and, while Kamnitzer may well have been one of Deutsch’s agents, there is nothing which has been declassified to confirm it.
To whom did Kamnitzer and Rünkel matter? They mattered to the KPD and to Moscow, which casts Pyke’s campaign for their release in a rather different light.
At the time, most of the details of Kamnitzer’s and Rünkel’s backgrounds were unknown to MI5. They were unaware of Deutsch’s activit
ies and had no idea that Lawn Road Flats was a hub for Soviet espionage. Yet they knew where Kamnitzer’s loyalties lay, noting that he ‘associated with British and alien Communists’ and was one of the editors of Inside Nazi Germany, an anti-war newsletter later described to Special Branch as ‘the publishing house of the Comintern in Great Britain’. It was only after Kamnitzer’s 1941 release from internment, to which MI5 raised no objection, that intelligence came in to say that this young German was ‘a fanatical Communist’ whose ‘whole life is, in the widest sense of the phrase, bound up in Party work’.
Rünkel was different in that MI5 knew more about him, and sooner. From late 1939 they had suspected him of being an NKVD agent. The following year his internment-camp commandant described him as ‘a fervent communist’ who ‘is stated to have been and still is a member of the Russian Secret Police’. A subsequent tip-off suggested he was a leading member of the N-Dienst – the intelligence service of the KPD in exile in Britain. MI5 even had a detailed account of his modus operandi in the CRTF, including a list of men whom he had denounced. So it was hardly surprising that after his release from internment Rünkel was placed under surveillance by Special Branch, which was how MI5 began to connect him with Pyke.
‘I have now definitely arranged about a “residence” for you to come to directly you are released’, wrote Pyke to Rünkel shortly before he was freed. Not only did Pyke arrange a place for Rünkel to stay, he also paid his expenses upon his release and employed him to perform ‘private secretarial duties’. Pyke would later offer Kamnitzer an almost identical job.
Rünkel’s ‘residence’ was the home of Bobby Carter, an architect who had recently joined the Party. It was a pretty, delicately proportioned house on Keats Grove in Hampstead, which was, explained Pyke, ‘unfortunately, now rather full, and you may have to sleep down in the air raid shelter for the first few days until we have discussed what you’d like to do and where you’d like to go and so on’.
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